BENEDICT, Neb. — Ross Hirschfeld says folks have been talking behind his back ever since the local paper reported that he has been getting millions of dollars in farm subsidies from Washington.

Hirschfeld, a hands-on farmer who shovels hog manure on Saturdays, just as he has since grade school, says fellow farmers get angry at him now when he buys land to expand. He says his daughter, who teaches school 300 miles away, has been asked by her grade-school students about her “rich father.”

Exactly how much Hirschfeld and other farmers get from Uncle Sam has become common knowledge around here because an environmental group has been posting names and figures on its Web site as part of its campaign against the nation’s multibillion-dollar farm-subsidy program.

At small-town coffee shops across the countryside, talk about the weather and Nebraska football now competes with gossip about who is getting big bucks from Washington.

The information is raising tensions between smaller farmers and bigger producers in otherwise neighborly farm communities. And it may be turning some people against the subsidy program as it now operates.

“When the numbers came out, I thought it was too much,” says Lynn Lowe, who has a small farm in the same county as Hirschfeld. “The government shouldn’t be helping them out — they get more than we see per year” in income.

“When’s enough enough?” Darell Bolton, a nearby farmer with a small operation, asks of the Hirschfelds’ government checks.

Under programs first created in the 1930s to stabilize farm income and prices, U.S. farmers got some $20 billion in subsidies in 2005, the last year for which figures are available. Most payments go to growers of five major crops — corn, soybeans, wheat, rice and cotton.

The Hirschfeld family — Hirschfeld, his brothers and his son — received $2.64 million from 1995 to 2005. The Hirschfelds farm mostly corn on a 5,000-acre spread near York and are among the top subsidy recipients in Nebraska’s 3rd Congressional District. It surpassed all districts in the nation in 2005 with $992 million in subsidies.

Hirschfeld, a third-generation farmer, estimates his family’s operation has a gross income of $4 million to $5 million annually.

But without subsidies, he says, they would not have been able to break even some years.

The top subsidy recipient in 2005 was an Arkansas rice-producer, Riceland Foods, which got nearly $16 million. Iowa farmers topped the list with $2.3 billion in subsidies in 2005. Iowa was followed by Texas ($2 billion), Illinois ($1.8billion) and Nebraska ($1.4 billion).

For several years now, the Washington-based Environmental Working Group has been posting those names and figures online in the hope that the publicity over the multimillion-dollar payments to large farmers would create widespread opposition to the program.

The group’s president, Ken Cook, instead wants subsidies to go to farmers who use good conservation practices.

“Some people say, ‘When are you going to take that damn Web site down?'” Cook says. “I look forward to the day people want to be on the list because they’re doing great conservation practices — that should be the rationale for subsidies.”

The Bush administration is proposing to stop paying subsidies to many big farmers by lowering the income eligibility cap from $2.5 million to $200,000. The plan would cost $87.3 billion over the next five years, versus the $105 billion spent over the past five.

Former Nebraska governor and current U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns is the lead salesman for the plan and has used the outrage over subsidies for big farmers to make his pitch.

Nebraska Farmers Union President John Hansen accuses Cook of inaccurately portraying farmers as rich welfare recipients and ignoring the underlying reason for subsidies — to stabilize food production in an often volatile marketplace.

“He wants to ruin public support for farm programs,” Hansen says. “Ken Cook knows good and well he’s creating confusion and hard feelings and misunderstandings between ag players and nonag people, and his agenda is to do just that.”

Robert Kracl, a farmer whose family partnership is among the top recipients of government subsidies in Nebraska, says the bad publicity has made agriculture a dirty word to many. He says that is one reason his son decided to take a job in Seattle after college rather than come home to farm in Nebraska.

“I’ve had people say, ‘What the hell are you guys getting these subsidies for?'” he says.

Kracl says many people don’t understand that the subsidy payments are split among several family members and are necessary to survive. His four-member family partnership received $2.3 million from 1995 to 2005.

He says cattle ranchers around town joke that “farmers have caps shaped like mailboxes so they can stick their heads in to get their government checks.”

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